Simulation

The market-oriented product development describes a focusing of needs, which leads ideally to high product quality and profitability. In the context of “Digital Factory” this paper focuses on the integrated product and process design, which is oriented to the physical part of the product. Due to the high product complexity, shorter product life cycles and increased competition situation is the product development faced with new challenges. Both the speed and the quality of planning should be improved further. Only the combination of organizational approaches and information technologies like for example “Simultaneous Engineering” and the “Digital Factory” promises a sufficient increase of planning efficiency. The following paper deals with existing methodologies and promising approaches in the field of “Digital Factory” against the background of an integrated product and process design. Referring to the requirements of logistics planning, an early integration of ...

The use of virtual engineering techniques in the field of product development requires a continuity of all digital development processes, workflows, tools and data. While this continuity is state-of-the-art on a level of geometric description it is still not achieved on a functional description level of product features. This paper analyses the state of the development and current problems in the process of introduction of virtual engineering in machine and plant engineering enterprises. Furthermore, the authors present their current research works in development of continuous digital process chains for product development.

This paper describes an autonomic machine control system applied to the adaptive control of a modular soldering machine. It covers customer requirements, design principles as well as benefits and advantages by making use of software agent technology. The particular case concerns the creation of a novel modular production machine currently running as a pilot, which will be sold worldwide from mid of the year.

Rules play an important role in everyday human interaction. In road traffic the participants have to obey to the rules to guarantee smooth traffic flow and to avoid accidents. The participants in these situations are called agents. Artificial agents that act in this environment must be aware of these rules and must act accordingly. Typically, such rules are formulated in natural language and thus, contain qualitative terms like “from left” or “turn right”. These terms are only intricately to implement to navigate agents. In this article we describe a so-called qualitative approach to formalize natural language spatial regulations. With the demonstrator SailAway [1] we show how the formalizations can be applied with little computational effort for collision free navigation in the domain of vessel navigation.

In this contribution we want to go into the difficulty of the integration of in-house as well as external development partners in the simulation process. We will focus on the process oriented exchange of simulation data in heterogeneous PDM/SDM system environments, taking into consideration the protection of the know-how of the participating partners. In this contribution a model, as well as its prototypical implementation, are introduced as a solution.

In development projects, a delay in connection with budget overruns is often the consequence of unrealistic scheduling. A simulation based approach for modeling development projects has been developed to support the project planner and will be presented in this paper. This novel approach allows the modeling and simulation of the project-specific structural organization and the process organization as well as the typical non-deterministic project behavior. Therefore, a realistic scheduling and resource allocation of complex development projects can be achieved. The application of the approach in projects of our industrial partners in the chemical industry has shown the suitability of the developed tools.

Today continuous planning is a prerequisite for competitiveness. Methods are required, that allow the handling of complexity in rapidly changing and complex networks. Model based methods provide insight in these networks and therefore help realizing advantages in competition. The vision of a modeling plant for building the required models effectively and in an industrial scale and concepts for long term usage of models will make model-based methods attractive for the industry. The validation of planning results using a model will advance the quality of planning and thereby create advantages in competition.

Competitiveness in the German industry, particularly in the capital and consumer goods sectors, is significantly dependent upon how well a company can adapt to market demands. Elements of such an adaptation process are the new development and modification of products, but equally the implementation of new or improved manufacturing technologies. In the parts manufacturing sector, which will be considered more closely in the following, changes to manufacturing programmes require new manufacturing structures. The question as to the integrity of the personnel and equipment structure planning thus arises. The following article will present a simulation-supported, heuristic procedure for the reciprocal adaptation of both planning areas.

This paper discusses ideas about and experiences with flexible simulation of real-time data streams generated by production networks when state-of-the-art automatic identification and localization technologies are applied. Flexibility here means the possibility to freely define the objects and their related types of events and statuses that are recorded in production and logistics processes. The data streams generated during simulation can be used to test and compare operational control strategies for processes in production networks in an offline or online mode.

A widely established tool for modeling, analysing, evaluating and optimizing in manufacturing planning is the discrete-event material flow simulation. Considerable benefits of using simulation show the necessity of increasingly applying simulation in the planning process. However, applying material flow simulation is also very costly. Results generated from simulation studies can be used for creating simulation-based characteristic diagrams. These diagrams allow the reduction of expenditures required for modeling and experimentation. Simulation-based characteristic diagrams can be used for efficiently solving frequent simulation problems. This paper introduces a methodology for reducing the expenditures required for creating simulation-based characteristic diagrams. The application of this methodology is demonstrated in an example.